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In recent years, we have repeatedly heard threats of civil disobedience from Christian Right Leaders – everyone from the signers of the historic, 2009 Manhattan Declaration (which included top Roman Catholic prelates and evangelical and organized Christian right leaders), to Rick Warren. We have heard predictions of civil war, revolution, and martyrdom from the likes of Catholic thinker John McCloskey, theocratic evangelical intellectual Peter Leithart, and even Christian Right electoral activist David Lane. We have also heard calls for political assassinations and secessionist civil war from White Southern Christian Nationalists, Michael Hill, David Whitney, and Michael Peroutka.

Most recently, some 200 Christian Right figures signed a renewed pledge of resistance to the anticipated Supreme Court decision favoring marriage equality. At a press conference, they called this “A Bonhoeffer Moment in America.” The reference is to the famous Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who resisted the Nazi regime and was hanged for his role in an unsuccessful plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler. Bonhoeffer is increasingly invoked by Christian Right leaders as they compare the situation in the United States to Nazi Germany and cast him—as they choose to define him—as a role model for Christian Right resistance.

On Tuesday, March 17, 2015, Palisades Presbytery became the 86th of the 171 presbyteries of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to approve redefining marriage in the Book of Order from the sacred union between “a man and a woman” to between “two people, traditionally a man and a woman.” It points to a deeper debate for Millennials about interpretations of biblical morality.

In general, American Protestantism has long been defined by its reliance on the Bible as its sole authority. And [David Gushee, an evangelical and professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University in Atlanta], still bases his ethical thinking on Scripture. But, he says, Protestantism has long changed its interpretations of the Bible as its experiences have begun to change.

Even Evangelicals as a whole, he points out, changed their interpretation of Scripture to accommodate expanded roles for women – upending selected verses that had been understood to mean women should be silent or keep their heads covered. The experience of slavery and the Holocaust also transformed the Bible’s ostensible teachings on race.

And today, new experiences, especially among the young, are transforming what Gushee sees as misinterpretations of what the Bible condemns in a handful of passages, written to address an ancient context.

“A big part of why that is the case is because more and more of us are coming to know gay and lesbian Christians, in their dignity and their suffering,” he says. “Many Millennials no longer find the older narratives of condemnation plausible: It doesn’t fit the facts, and it doesn’t fit the lives of people that we know.”

[Alex Patchin] McNeill, part of a younger generation of leaders in the PC(USA) and [executive director of More Light Presbyterians (MLP), an advocacy group in Minnetonka, Minn., that has worked to change the church’s definition of marriage], invokes the traditional “Protestant principle” proclaimed in the church’s Book of Order: “The church affirms Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei, that is, ‘The church reformed, always to be reformed according to the Word of God’ in the power of the Spirit.”

In his LGBTQ Nation op-ed, Frederick Clarkson looks at how Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (FRC) thinks Christians who support marriage equality are not really Christians and that religious freedom is only for those who hold to what he calls "orthodox" views. Excerpt:

It...helps to clarify that when Christian Right leaders talk about religious liberty—they often really mean theocratic religious supremacism.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, took to the airwaves after the filing of UCC’s suit to claim that the church is not really Christian, and that those who support gay rights don’t have the same rights as conservative Christians—because ‘true religious freedom’ only applies to ‘orthodox religious viewpoints.’”

Perkins’ blunt statements are a sobering reminder that theocratic factions of the U.S. Right have long sought to regain the religious and political hegemony they lost when the Constitution was ratified in the 18th century

Bruce Wilson writes about The Gathering, which provides millions of dollars to religious-right causes.

Like its familial evangelical parent The Family, The Gathering takes the coercive moral authoritarianism inherent to anti-LGBT laws being passed (aided and encouraged by The Gathering-funded groups) from Uganda to Russia, and fuses it to the radical economic libertarianism of the Koch brothers.........[The Gathering] have bankrolled, from Uganda to Russia, the mounting international war on LGBT rights; evangelical opposition to healthcare reform and action to curb climate change; the promotion of young-earth creationism and Intelligent Design; ministries training African leaders in the “biblical worldview”; legal efforts that have fought against same-sex marriage and LGBT rights in the United States, and have forced anti-gay fundamentalist bible clubs into thousands of U.S. public schools....

Its foundation heads are plaintiffs in a legal challenge to healthcare reform now before the U.S. Supreme Court and they are leading efforts to attack organized labor and defund public schools.

The colossus of The Gathering is the National Christian Foundation, which gave out an estimated $670 million dollars in grants in 2013 and has rocketed, in just two years, from spot number 34 to number 12 on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s “Philanthropy 400” list.

In 10 days, the Iowa GOP will elect a new party Chairman. And Danny Carroll, the man that they’re likely to choose to supervise the 2016 Republican caucuses is an ardent social conservative who gave up pumpkin farming to devote himself full-time to the fight to save heterosexual marriage in the Hawkeye State.

The bill this article concerns subsequently had its most controversial provision stripped out by a legislative committee, but it had unanimous bipartisan support when the provision was still in the bill. Take note.

In late January, weeks before Kansas’ and Arizona’s odious anti-gay segregation bills drew fury across the country, the Mississippi state Senate quietly passed its own viciously homophobic “religious liberty” measure to virtually no fanfare. The bill, which is nearly identical to Arizona’s, would have the same effect as its now-notorious counterparts, allowing any private business to turn away gays at the door. But unlike Kansas’ and Arizona’s bills, which drew fierce Democratic opposition, the Mississippi measure passed with unanimous bipartisan support.

Author, blogger, and civil rights and anti-war activist David Mixner offers a personal reflection on faith and the fight for social justice. Here's an excerpt:

I have to continue with the battle until I can't lift my head any longer. Not because I am special or indispensable but because I am one of you and each and everyone one of us is needed. By continuing to embrace life, I am one more voice that refuses to be silenced until our children can live in total freedom.

After all Archbishop Romero believed that sin was simply to do nothing in the face injustice, war and poverty. My 'fellow travelers' in life always have been those who believe the Archbishop's words:

Peace is not the product of terror or fear. Peace is not the silence of cemeteries. Peace is not the silent result of violent repression. Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all. Peace is dynamism. Peace is generosity. It is right and it is duty.

In other words, while it is losing a big battle (same sex marriage), the Religious Right still hasn’t lost its most important one (abortion) and on a host of other fronts (heterosexual marriage, inequality, criminal justice, religion in the public square), it is having to reconfigure in more productive ways–in ways that are more “seamless garment”, to use a Catholic expression. This is all to the good. Under a microscope, reform can look like defeat. But at the scale of history, things often end up very different.

I'm always amazed at the logical loops the religious right tie around themselves. Here's the latest pep talk video for Indiana's proposed marriage amendment and, of course, it's all about the "right to vote."